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Development Environment 1

Since I started cross-pollinating with people who learned in a different environment from mine, I remember questions and remarks similar to this:

I’m using DevC++, what compiler are you using?

This evidences a lack of knowledge about what makes a development environment… a fragility in the ability to get things done that hangs for dear life on a particular way to do things with particular tools instead of knowing how the pieces fit together and being able to mix and match. Hopefully a bit of context can help fill the gaps.

This is the start of a series of posts aimed towards anyone who wants to start developing and needs to make sense of what they need to start developing software and how the pieces fit together, so that a particular tool or collection of tools isn’t what defines the reader, but what helps them be productive in a particular environment and circumstance.

The tools most commonly used in developing are: a text editor; an interpreter, or a compiler and linker; a debugger; an automatic build tool; a profiler; a static code analysis tool.

This series will not go in depth on how the tools work. Instead, I hope to give an overview of what they do, and some examples of known tools in the category. Almost every category of tool used in software development depends on the output of another one to work; thus the combination of tools that get you from code to finished product is called a “toolchain”.

Some programs bundle many or all of a particular toolchain together; some even let you swap tools within a category to better fit your needs and preferences. Those are called IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), and I’ll cover them last.

The Text Editor

First of all, with almost all certainty, your chosen language’s toolchain starts its with plain text. This means that you can write the code for it in any text editor. Many text editors provide “syntax highlighting”, which means that they understand enough of what certain programming languages mean and highlight the different elements of the source code for ease of reading. Just to be clear, the source code is what you actually write in a particular programming language to specify the steps that the final program needs to execute.

Here is a brief, vastly non-exhaustive list of gratis text editors:

TextEdit, the out-of-box MacOSX editor

Notepad, the out-of-box Windows editor

Gedit / Leafpad / Kate, the out-of-box editors which usually install with GNOME, XFCE and KDE desktop environments in Linux

Notepad++, an editor available for windows with some good features aimed at software development

Emacs (My editor of choice), a multi-platform and customizable text editor with its own learning curve. I recommend if you’ll use this put some time apart to learn the basics, then start learning to program, then put some time apart to learn to ease your programming using external modules.

Vi (I’ve not used this one extensively; it’s most used incarnation is Vim), is also multiplatform, also customizable, also has its own learning curve. It’s style is very distinct from Emacs’. As with Emacs, though, I recommend you set apart time to learn it properly before heading into progamming, then learn to customize it with plugins to ease your programming. It’s particularly important in that it’s standardized in POSIX, so you can expect consistent behavior.

The output of this program is a text file with source code, which is then processed by either the interpreter, the compiler, or the static code analyzer.